The gap between hobby and professional

Part eight in a series of posts about The Future Of Local written as research for Talk About Local.

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Before I get to the summary and conclusion, and trust me, I intend to get to them in the next post, I want to talk about the space between the lone blogger writing as a hobby and the full-on commercial media organisation. To do this I’m going to talk about Rhubarb Radio, a community radio station in Birmingham I’ve been watching from the periphery since it emerged in Summer 2008.

The story of Rhubarb Radio is long and complex and I’m slightly reticent in writing about it now as I’m sure a) I’ll get things wrong and b) I’ll upset someone in the process. So let me preface this by saying I’m not judging or praising those involved and I don’t want this to turn into a post-mortum. What I want to do is take my observations of Rhubarb over those 2.5 years and see how they can inform the future of local media. If nothing else Rhubarb was a brave and interesting experiment and deserves to be learned from.

You’ll notice I’m fluctuating between tenses here. I’m not sure if Rhubarb is still a viable enterprise at the moment. Over Christmas a lot of the regular people stood down and stopped doing shows and there have been issues with funding and so on. Since I don’t really have any contacts inside the organisation anymore, nor the time or inclination to get to “the truth”, I can’t comment on its status. So for the purposes of this article I’m going to draw a line at December 2010 and talk about the period up to then in the past tense.

Phew!

So, without further a do.

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Things I think Rhubarb Radio did wrong

Predicated audience size on level of interest. A lot of people were excited by the prospect of doing something with Rhubarb Radio. The first meeting I attended had a good 30 or so people there and time-slots for shows quickly filled up. If I had to guess I’d say at least 500 individuals gave their time to the project on some level. Audiences, however, were poor. Anecdotally, most shows had under 20 listeners with triple figures being very rare. The majority of listening took place through the “listen again” option. It’s fair to say Rhubarb didn’t really reach a community outside its own.

Professionalised unnecessarily. I remember early meetings dealing with jingles and training, putting people into units of presenters and engineers. There was talk about buying a very expensive computerised music-library system used by commercial radio stations. Within a year most presenters I saw (other than the turntable users) were playing music off their iPods and chatting informally between tracks.

Was dependent on an unsustainable infrastructure. Rhubarb was launched by Dynamics Arts who used their expertise in getting significant funding and support before stepping aside after a year or so. This enabled the station to pay for professional things like dedicated servers, PRS broadcast licenses, upkeep of the studio (donated gratis buy the Custard Factory) and so on. Unfortunately a business model for the station didn’t emerge and it wasn’t able to scale down thanks to the infrastructure provided at the outset. It’s now in a position where the administration needed to keep the station going is distracting from the act of creating radio.

Was obsessed with an existing model. There exists an obsession with radio from a golden age. I suspect a lot of this is nostalgia for the days of listening to the likes of John Peel under the bedcovers and I’ll admit to being a willing victim of this disease. The times I joined in on Rhubarb shows were magical, even if no-one was listening. The act of performance, of structuring your conversation to entertain, is very rewarding and seductive. But, as with the record industry being confused with the music industry, Rhubarb assumed that in order to do radio you needed to behave like the BBC. No swearing before the watershed was a particularly hilarious rule that everyone seemed to obey because that’s how it’s done. Wrapped in their blankets of nostalgia no-one wanted to experiment, to push the boundaries of what radio could be. This was the perfect platform to do that on – a blank slate with no existing audience to alienate – and yet, with some exceptions, most of them were happy to carbon copy the formats of radio stations with massive audiences without questioning why those formats exist.

There were plenty of good things that came out of Rhubarb, and it should always be remembered that the journey is more important than the end result. I’m sure those involved in the project got a lot out of it and will take many lessons onto their next endeavours. Hell, I couldn’t have written the above if it hadn’t have happened.

So, with the benefit of hindsight, and with the Government’s local TV plans in mind, what’s my recipe for a local media organisation that is sustainable, self-empowering and ultimately useful to the communities?

(Makes cup of tea…)

Designing a local media organisation in the Internet age

1. Setting up.

If you have expenses, make sure your business plan covers them. Do not depend on funding. Not only is state funding a rare commodity, you’ll have to satisfy requirements that won’t necessarily relate to what you want to do. Advertising and sponsorship are also hard work.

If it’s looking too expensive, cut back. You probably don’t need a mixing desk or £1000 camera. Go through the bargain bin an Maplins. Use free software rather than expensive hardware. Borrow stuff before you decide if you need it.

Find out if you have an audience. Is there a tangible need for what you want to do? Or is it just you wanting to do it? Build appropriately.

If you need to go live experiment on free ‘casting services to begin with. Look at things like UStream. And once you’re happy with your live output don’t get your own server or invest in excessive hosting packages. Use a scalable service like Mixlr which grows as you grow.

For archiving, use services like YouTube or MixCloud. That way if you you do get unexpectedly popular you won’t get brought down by a bandwidth bill.

2. Programming.

Don’t get distracted by live broadcasting. While recording live is fun and interaction is nice, it’s unrealistic to expect your audience to join you at a specific time. Look at the success of the BBC’s podcasts and iPlayer for niche subjects. Think about how “specialist” shows, usually shunted to the graveyard shift, now have a daytime audience. Live media is a hangover from the capacity limitations of broadcast media when there was no other way to get information to people. This is not a problem anymore.

Don’t get distracted by your brand. Again, this is an echo from the low-capacity broadcast model. No-one really cares that much about your brand. You should only care about it if you need to maintain audiences across all the shows to please the advertisers. If you don’t then the brand is irrelevant. Make the shows good and the brand will look after itself.

Don’t copy the professionals. If you want to make a different you’re going to have to do something special to get noticed. Pumping out the same formats as the big guys is not going to cut it, especially when you’re competing with trained and experienced professionals. If you’re reporting on local news with video you don’t want people to be thinking “this isn’t as good as the BBC.”

If you need convincing of this look at some of the cringeworthy attempts made by local newspapers to go “multimedia”. This is a good example as I know the reporter is a damn good writer making it doubly painful to see her struggling in a medium she’s got no experience in.

Experiment and innovate. If you’re starting with nothing then you have nothing to lose. Don’t be afraid to try new ways of getting your material across. Play with formats, invent new ones, bring in ideas from other mediums. Find that thing that makes you unique.

Fill the gaps. By definition, mainstream local media can only cover those things that they can get a large audience for. That leaves everything else free for the taking. Look for things in your area that are of interest to a reasonable number of people and pick one of those.

Go deep. Have you ever seen big media cover something you know about? Did you notice how they totally got it wrong in a really annoying way? If you can’t compete on production values, compete on depth and accuracy. If you’re dealing with junior gymnastics or urban cycling or roller-derby deal with it really really well. Be as passionate and knowledgeable as the people who care about those things.

Develop your own schedule. TV and Radio has a schedule based on fitting into 24 hours and reaching minimum audiences. Magazines are similarly limited in their layouts. You don’t have to follow them. Your shows can be 5 minutes or 5 hours long, your articles a couple of paragraphs or 20,000 words. I’ve been quite taken with The Awl of late which looks like a standard magazine website but is ignoring whole chunks of the magazine website rulebook. There’s a nice New York Times article about them which is quite inspiring if you’re mad enough to give it a go yourself.

Don’t get trapped by medium or genre. You’re not a TV channel or radio station or magazine. Think of yourself as a vehicle for awesomeness. While limitations are a good thing and you should play to your strengths, don’t get tied to a model unnecessarily.

Here’s a nice example of that. NPR’s website is pretty much what you’d expect for America’s underfunded public radio station. Index of shows, podcasts, news and so forth. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary and certainly not troubling the commercial giants of the US media. But while they are small and fragile they are also nimble. This 3 minute video came my way this week.

It’s nothing like a 60 minute radio show. You could argue it’s got nothing to do with “radio” at all. And yet it’s got NPR written all over it. Think about why that is.

3. Expanding

Think hard about what sort of organisation you need. Don’t create roles because you think you should have them. Let the needs of the organisation dictate the roles. At the same time, if no-one wants to do a role structure things so you don’t need that job done. (I know of a monthly event that keeps their entry free purely because no-one wants to be treasurer.)

Consider a co-oporative or alliance. If there’s a bunch of you who are all happily self-sufficient in doing you own things then there’s no reason you shouldn’t just carry on with what works. Don’t form a company just because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do. Just collaborate on the stuff you can’t do alone and share skills and resources across the group.

Don’t be unrealistic. Traditional success in media is hard. Even the experienced professionals don’t know what’s going on these days so your chances of global domination are pretty slim. But if you have realistic sense of your own abilities and the audience for your thing, along with a sustainable vehicle to bring the two together, you should be successful enough to make a difference.

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This was more a how-to than a what-will-be but I’ve tried to make it about the emerging local media landscape. I’ve been thinking more about Hunt’s Local TV thing and it still doesn’t make sense. It’s like a town planner looking at medieval castles falling into disrepair and thinking “What we need are more castles, only smaller and made of polystyrene bricks.”

Right now we don’t know what the dominant form of local media will be. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a decade or so we’re back to a small number of major players using a standardised media toolset, but I very much doubt it’ll be the same players and the same tools as today. What we need to be doing is experimenting to find out what people want, what they need and how it can be provided. And that needs a shift in attitude from the DCMS to the DIY podcaster.

Finally, I haven’t mentioned Jon Bounds in this post and that can’t be allowed to happen. Jon and Julia Gilbert did a show on Rhubarb Radio called The Big Paws. They’ve just started doing it from their living room using Mixlr for the live stream and MixCloud for the archives. The end product is pretty much the same which begs the question, what could a “radio station” offer them? It’s not a rhetorical question, by the way.

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Next, the conclusion. I promise.